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Address 



AT THE 



Three Hundredth Anniversary 



OF THE SETTLEMENT OF 



JAMESTOWN 



By 

Hon. Thomas Nelson Page 



RICHMOND, VA. 

WHITTET & SHEPPERSON, PRINTERS 

1919 







W44 M- TI1E C O MPLIMKN 1 S , w OF 

THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA 
IN THE STATE OF VIRGINIA 







g)CLA565159 









ADDRESS 



It seems to me that what is said on this spot on this occa- 
sion should relate to the spiritual side of the work and the 
fruits of the Jamestown settlement, whose Three Hundredth 
Anniversary we are here today to celebrate, rather than to the 
material or physical side. And it is in this spirit that I wish 
to deal with it in this presence. 

And first on this spot on this occasion I wish to mention 
with reverence the name of Sir Walter Raleigh: "Lord, and 
Chief Governor of Virginia," to whom, under God's Provi- 
dence, more than any other human being is due the fact that 
this Country belongs to the English Speaking Race, and the 
Civilization which it represents. 

Three hundred years ago, on this Island — which until then, 
through all the ages, since the birth of things, had lain desert 
and untrodden by any feet save those of the wild beast and the 
yet wilder savage, — to which Spain had simply asserted a 
traditionary right as a part of the vast unknown region of 
the American Continent — landed a little band of sea-worn 
Englishmen and took posession in the name of God and of the 
Crown of England. Since the 20th day of December preceding, 
when they weighed anchor in the River Thames and dropped 
down the stream with the receding tide, they had in their three 
little ships been making their way slowly and painfully across 
the wintry Atlantic. These small vessels: "The Sarah Con- 
stant," (of one hundred tons) with Captain Christopher New- 
port, the Admiral, in command, "The Goodspeed," (of forty 
tons), with Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, the Vice-Admiral, 
and "The Discovery," a pinnace, (of twenty tons), with Cap- 
tain John Ratcliffe, had, reckoning all the time since they 
weighed anchor in the Thames until they dropped anchor in 



the Powhatan, made only about one knot per hour. Time 
moves slowly when weighted with the burden of Fate. Those 
frail boats in which men might hesitate now to cruise along the 
margin of the coast, bore in their wombs the destinies of 
Nations. When on May 13, 1607, they moored to the trees of 
this Island in six fathom water, thej^ moored Europe to Amer- 
ica. They moored the Old to the New. They moored the 
English Civilization with all its possibilities to the New World 
with all its possibilities. There were times when it appeared 
that their cables were in danger of parting. But though frayed 
to the slenderest, they never wholly gave way. 

Let us pause for a moment to get a view, if we can, of the 
conditions environing and enveloping their great enterprise. 

When that band of "four-score souls" boarded those little 
ships in the River Thames and weighed anchor, England was 
just preparing to celebrate the great annual holiday of the 
English People: Christmas. It was the England of the 
"spacious times of Great Elizabeth;" for the after-glow of her 
mighty reign had not yet faded out. Raleigh and Bacon and 
Coke and Southampton and Burleigh and Walsingham, were 
among the statesmen of England, and Ben Johnston and 
Michael Drayton, were among her poets. 

Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser had but now 
laid by their lyres; and in London, Marlowe's fellow-county- 
man, who gave a new realm to England — a realm out of the 
imagination, as Raleigh gave a new physical realm, was writing 
those immortal dramas which are today the heritage of America 
no less than of England. With the bells of London almost 
beginning to peal out their Christmas chimes, these men bound 
for the Virgin land after many prayers and sermons in sundry 
churches, boarded their little vessels and dropped down the 
river, headed for Virginia. 

For six long weeks they lay anchored in the Downs, thump- 
ing up and down, within but a few miles of the English shore ; 
where their courage was sustained, says the chronicle, by 
"Worthy Master Hunt," the simple parish priest, who though 



so ill that his bodily sickness is noted in the report, stood forth 
at need the first of that courageous band of Soldiers of Christ, 
whose highest ambition has ever been to serve their Master 
faithfully by sea or land; reckoning, like the great Apostle to 
the Gentiles, that "the sufferings of this present time are not 
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed" 
hereafter. 

It was not until the 18th day of February, two months 
after starting, that they lost sight of the English coast and 
found themselves upon the shoreless sea, with naught visible 
but the heaving waste of waters and the heavens above. 

We know from the reports that they touched and rested 
a few days at the Azores, and found for a brief period a sum- 
mer land in the Islands of Dominica and of Nevis, where the 
wonders of the Tropics first dawned on their astonished vision. 

At Nevis some trouble occurred, taking shape, as is known, 
in something like mutiny, and because thereof, one of the chief 
of the voyagers fell under such suspicion that he was put under 
arrest, or, to use his own term, "was unjustly restrained of 
his liberty;" in which condition he remained until the 26th 
day of June following, when he was sworn of the Council of 
Virginia, and emerges from obscurity into the romance which 
has for three hundred years enveloped the fame of "Captain 
John Smith": Sometime, "Governor of Virginia, and Admiral 
of New England." 

It was the 26th of April when, "about four o'clock in the 
morning," storm-tost and travel-worn, they entered the Capes 
of the Chesapeake, and dropped anchor for the first time in 
the waters of Virginia. 

They anchored England to America. 

The day that a beseiged city capitulates is not so truly 
the day of its capture as the day on which the beseigers plant 
their standard upon the walls never again to be taken down. 
So, much more here. The approach had been long and ardu- 
ous. Effort after effort, attempt after attempt had been made 



through more than half a century to make a breach in Spain's 
extensive defenses. A break had actually been made twenty- 
odd years before by a gallant and devoted band on Roanoke 
Island, some scores of leagues to the southward. But the as- 
sault had finally failed : the little band on Roanoke Island had 
disappeared into the mysterious limbo of Croatan, the vague 
land of Romance. It was this new band of settlers who on 
this May day, 1607, finally seized and permanently held the 
outpost, which was the key to the Continent, and led to the 
supremacy of the Saxon Race, with its Laws, its Religion, and 
its Civilization in North America. 

The account of the landing given at the time tells how, 
"After much and weary search with their barge coasting still 
before, (as Virgil writeth Aeneas did, arriving in the region 
of Italy called Latium, upon the bankes of the River Tyber) in 
the country of a Warrowance called Wowinchapuncha, (a 
ditionary to Powhatan) within this faire River of Paspiheigh, 
which Ave have called the King's River, they selected and ex- 
tended plaine and spot of earth which thrust out into the depth 
and middest of the channel, making a kinde of Chesonesus or 
Peninsula. The Trumpets sounding, the Admirall strooke saile 
and before the same the rest of the Fleete came to an ancor, 
and here to loose no further time the Colony disimbarked, and 
every man brought his particular store and furniture together 
with the general provision ashore." * * * * And there- 
upon, "a certain canton and quantity of that little half Island 
of ground was measured which they began to fortifie, and 
thereon in the name of God to raise a Fortresse with the ablest 
and speediest meanes they could." 

Except the historical student, no one knows what the 
earliest settlers and their immediate successors had to face. 
Death was nothing to those men. It was a mere incident of 
the life, as it is today of the soldier's in the field. It was the 
torture of the savage ; the stake and the rack of the Spaniard ; 
"the arrow that flyeth by day and the pestilence that walketh 
in darkness" — all these they found. Of the one hundred and 



four men left by Newport when he sailed from Virginia in 
June, 1607, he found on his return in January with the first 
supply, but thirty-four alive: Of the four hundred or there- 
abouts left in 1609, Lord Delaware found but sixty-two or 
sixty-three surviving in 1610. In the next twenty years, of 
the seven or eight thousand who came to Virginia to seize and 
settle her for England, over six thousand died on the way or 
in the first year of their "seasoning." 

As we stand here today, it is almost impossible for the 
mind to conceive what these men underwent. The whole world 
has been not only explored, but become well-nigh as familiar 
to us as our own home county or town. We read in the morn- 
ing press accounts of the ordinary happenings in every quarter 
of the globe. Every sea has been charted and almost every 
land has become the playground of the tourist. The fabled 
labors of Hercules, and the far-famed travels of Ulysses are 
surpassed by a thousand captains who sail the Arctic and the 
Tropic Seas. But in those days those men faced every danger 
which the human imagination could conjure up and faced it 
with a constant mind. If they turned back to England months 
and months away, of toilsome, tedious and perilous travel, they 
found the Spaniard with sword and rack and stake on the 
horizon. If they faced the new Continent, they looked into 
the vast, impenetrable and illimitable forest, behind every tree 
of which and in every patch of weeds in which there lurked a 
murderous foe. They had reached a charmed but an unknown 
land with a changeable and untried climate; their provisions 
originally intended to last only until they could seed and har- 
vest a new crop, had been wasted during their long voyage, 
and would not last them out. Their form of government was 
one ill calculated as it proved, to meet the needs of their situ- 
ation. But their direst enemy was one more lurking than the 
savage Indian and more fell than the cruel Spaniard. They 
had pitched upon a landing-place simply because of the security 
which it offered against their enemies, without knowing aught 
of the climate and its perils, and it proved to be a spot so 
malarial that before the first summer was out, sixty men of 

7 



the one hundred and twenty were dead of wounds and disease. 
The sounds of their sufferings so impressed itself on that 
scholarly historian, George Percy, third President of the 
Colony, that he pictured it in one of his reports, whose virility 
is today, the wonder of the English writers. 

"Burning fevers destroyed them, some departed suddenly, 
but for the most part they died of mere famine. There were 
never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as 
we were in this new discovered Virginia. * * * * There 
was groaning in every corner of the Fort most pitiful to hear. 
If there was any conscience in men," says the historian, "it 
would make their hearts to bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings 
and outcries * * * some departing out of the world, some- 
times three and four in a night; in the morning their bodies 
trailed out of the cabins like dogs to be buried." 

It came to the point, "when ten men could neither go nor 
stand." 

This was the sickly season when, without knowledge of 
malarial disease, they were in their half-starved condition at 
the mercy of the agues and fevers. But happily, the change 
of the season came at last; the winter, a bitter one on both 
shores of the Atlantic, drove away the pestilence. 

Then came the picturesque incident over which historians 
of late have quarreled so much, when according to Smith's 
account, his life was saved by the young Indian Princess, 
Pocahontas. Time fails to repeat the arguments in this place. 
To me they appear to establish the fact beyond reasonable 
question. However, that may be, that winter the small rem- 
nant of men explored and charted the waters of the Chesapeake 
with its noble tributaries to the Falls of the Potomac, where the 
Capital of the Nation now stands, as within a short period 
afterwards they explored the northern Chesapeake and the 
Susquehanna, mapping their discoveries with an accuracy which 
is the wonder of the present time. 

A conspiracy plotted by Kendall, in the absence of the 
exploration party, to seize the pinnace and sail northward to 

8 



the shores of New Founrlland, where the fishing fleet from 
Europe might always be found, was defeated, possibly by the 
return of Captain Smith; — at least, he has the credit of it. 
The guns of the Fort were trained on the mutineers, and Ken- 
dall, the ring-leader, was promptly tried and shot. Curiously, 
the discovery of the plot was due to a private who was under 
sentence of death for having struck the President when the 
latter was beating him, and who, when he was mounting the 
gallows, divulged the conspiracy. 

Smith himself came near falling the victim to a partisan 
faction, he was tried for having lost his men during his explora- 
tion, but his life was saved by the unexpected return of Newport 
with provisions and reinforcements for the Colony. Among 
these was an element which possibly did more to establish the 
new plantation than even the provisions, for among the new 
immigrants were a number of women. 

Once more came the starving time; but young Pocahontas 
appears to have been the guardian angel of her new-found 
friends. 

The time is filled with exploration, with attacks on their 
Indian enemies, and counter attacks, with charges and counter 
charges; but all the time the little Colony was establishing 
itself for England and for her Faith, at the cost of as brave 
and devoted lives as were ever laid down for the cause of 
Religion and of Freedom. 

In the Nova Britannia, dated February, 1609, are given the 
plans, objects and hopes of the Virginia Company. The chief 
objects are stated, "First to advance the Kingdom of God. 
Second, to advance the Kingdom of England. And third, to 
relieve and preserve those already of the Colony, and lay a 
solid foundation for the future good of this Commonwealth. ' ' 

Time fails on this occasion to mention the names of even 
the leaders of those wonderful men, and yet more wonderful 
women, who laid the foundation for the future good not only 
of this Commonwealth of Virginia but of this great Common- 
wealth of the United States. Unnamed as they are, and un- 



honored as they have long been, they saved this Continent for 
Protestantism and the English Civilization. 

We have not time here to do honor even to that "valiant 
gentleman," Edward Maria Wingfield, first successor to Sir 
Walter Raleigh as Governor of Virginia; or to those brave 
members of the "First Counsell, who were in front in mayn- 
tayning the Forte," on that fierce attack by the Indians, while 
Newport was exploring the King's River, and planting a 
"crosse" on Whit Sunday, 1607, at the Falls where now stands 
the Capital of Virginia. 

I can only take time to mention an episode which must 
have brought happiness into at least two hearts, and more 
cheer possibly into the little fever-stricken settlement which 
rose where we stand today. 

Soon after Newport's departure for England in December, 
1608, there was a marriage betwixt John Ladron, carpenter, 
and Anne Burrus, the maid of Mrs. Forrest; he aged 26, she 
but fourteen. Mrs. Forrest was the first gentlewoman, and 
her maid the first woman servant ' ' that arrived in our Colony, ' ' 
"which was the first marriage we had in Virginia," and was 
the first marriage according to the Protestant rite of matri- 
mony which occurred on this Continent. 

Time fails me to go into the story of the sufferings and 
struggles, the heroic deeds, and yet more heroic sacrifices that 
these settlers endured. Of all that brave and gallant company 
not one found that for which he set forth, save haply, "Worthy 
Master Hunt,"' who counted nought so that he might win souls 
to Christ, and Captain John Smith, who owes his abiding fame 
even more to his pen than to his sword. 

Christopher Newport, who was the Guardian Angel of the 
Colony, and preserved it from extirpation on more than one 
occasion, has no monument in all this State of Virginia. It is 
questionable if even the name with which he is supposed to be 
associated, actually was derived from him. He explored the 
Seas of both the East and West; and having had sole command 
of the first five voyages which brought the first Colonists here 

10 



and subsequently relieved their necessities when they were 
about to perish ; his shotted hammock was swung at the last in 
the long surges of the Indian Seas. 

Bartholomew Gosnold, that "worthy and religious gentle- 
man, "bold discoverer and explorer of both coasts of Virginia, 
was laid in an unmarked grave somewhere there where the 
waters have cut into the shore, and his heroic dust has long 
since been swept away by the waters of the James, like that 
of so many another brave and devoted soldier and mariner. 
Years afterwards, Captain John Smith declared that he had 
not one foot of ground in Virginia, "not the very house he had 
builded; nor the land he had digged with his own hands." 

But though these men and their followers are not known 
save to a few historical students, their work is written large 
upon the History of the World. They laid the foundation for 
what we call North America. To use their own term, "they 
broke the ice and beat the paths," and the rest was compara- 
tively easy. 

From their work, and out of their contentions, for there 
was contention enough, came the enlarged Charters of 1609, 
1612 and 1618, which gave and guaranteed to all Virginians and 
their posterity the rights, privileges and immunities of English- 
born citizens forever. 

Previous to this time Colonists who left their country did 
not take with them across seas even those rights and privileges 
that they had at home; the new country was under Martial 
Law, with all who were therein. But when these English 
settlers came they insisted on bringing with them, and they 
brought with them, the rights of free-born Englishmen. And 
this was the first great service which this first Colony of 
England rendered to mankind. 

If one were summoned to make good the claim that God 
had set His stamp here, he might point to the course of history 
which in its wonderful development led up through the strange 
chances and changes of the Sixteenth Century to the final and 
abiding settlement of the Continent by the Saxon Race with its 

II 



Civilization. He might show how Spain grew so great and 
powerful that she surpassed Rome in the days of her greatest 
might and extended her rule over many times the territory 
Rome ruled. He might show how, ignoring the example of 
Ancient Rome she endeavored to rule the minds as well as the 
actions of men ; how a bigoted and mind-cramping ecclesiasti- 
cism fastened its tyrannical shackles on the aspiring thought 
of the time and threatened to destroy Civilization in its strong- 
holds. 

Then he might picture the great awakening throughout 
JEurope ; the apparent workings of Providence through the gen- 
erations — 'which produced the Mariner's Compass; Gunpowder 
— and noblest of all inventions: the Art of Printing. You 
should see the light of the New Dawn extend as far as England, 
and there through the pious zeal of the Scholar Priest, John 
Wyckliffe, suddenly reach the people and as with the en- 
chanter's wand, quicken them to life. Then you should see 
this awakened and quickened people declare against Foreign 
Ecclesiasticism, and, for England — and, from this time you 
should see the fierce struggle between England and Spain ; the 
Saxon and the Latin — the New and the Old — the rights of the 
Englishmen and the pretensions of Prerogative: Civil, Mili- 
tary and Ecclesiastical. 

All the middle of the Sixteenth Century was a long strug- 
gle between Spain and England — or, more rightly, between the 
Old and the New. And Spain had allied herself with the 
former and England with the latter. 

Happily for the world, then came in the Providence of 
God to the throne of England a woman with the brain not only 
of a man, but of a man far beyond those who usually wear 
crowns. And yet more happily, she found herself at the head 
of an aroused and quickened people at the flood-tide of their 
force and genius — most of all aroused to the perils of Spanish 
domination; from which England had escaped by a hair's 
breadth. She had the blood of the English Gentry as well as 
of Royalty in her veins and she hated Spain with all her soul, 
and had good right to hate her! 

12 



Burleigh and Walsingham and Essex were her Counsellors; 
Drake and Hawkins; the Gilberts and Howards were among 
her seamen ; Sidney and Raleigh were among her courtiers ; and 
Raleigh, greatest of all her Statesmen, was but a Knight, 
knighted for Virginia. 

While the statesmen helped her to play her great game in 
Europe; her sea captains helped her to bring it to success in 
those seas where Spain's overreaching power had decreed it to 
be death to fly any flag but her own. 

The wealth, the power and the arrogance of Spain, with 
her bigotry, aroused the people of England to a pitch which 
had, possibly, not been known since the Norman conquest. 

Although England claimed the middle part of North 
America by virtue of the discovery made in 1496, by John 
Cabot, under Patent of Henry VII., the Continent was won a 
hundred years later in the War with Spain, which lasted sub- 
stantially through the last half of the Sixteenth Century. 

For a generation the great sea captains of England had 
been training in western waters, and garnering up implacable 
hate against Spain. Sir Philip Sidney had written vigorously 
of England's opportunity and duty; Hawkins, Drake, the Gil- 
berts, Grenville, and others had flouted Spain and fought her 
from Cadiz to Peru. And then in God's Providence came 
Walter Raleigh. Of all the great men of the time, as has been 
said, to him more than to any other was due the capture of 
this New World for England and her People. It was his far- 
reaching prevision that foresaw her worth — his lofty ambition 
that desired and his all-mastering genius that conceived and 
carried through the mighty plans which made her an English 
possession. He was the first and ' ' Chief Governor of Virginia. ' ' 
To him more than to any other one man this Nation owes a 
monument; and stands as one. 

We may not go into the long struggle he made to plant 
here the Banner of England and of Protestantism. He died 
after long imprisonment, a victim to the hate of the nation he 
had so long and implacably fought — the most foolish and 

13 



cowardly of all the sacrifices that unbridled power has ever 
made. But he had planted here a colony which contained the 
seed of a mighty nation which has made good his wildest imag- 
ining, and thank God, that he lived, as he wrote Sidney, he 
hoped to live, "to see it a Mighty Nation." 

The crucial battle was fought in the English Channel in 
those summer days when the Spanish Armada succumbed to the 
aroused Saxon Spirit, when sufficiently aroused has always 
swept everything before it. Had the Spanish Armada been 
victorious the settlement of America by the Anglo-Saxon would 
have ended there forever, and with it, doubtless would have 
gone to decline the Anglo-Saxon civilization. 

The victory which England won that day and in the suc- 
ceeding days when the Sea Dogs of Devon hunted down the 
broken sections of the fleet which attempted to sail around the 
British Isles, but to strew their wrecks to the Hebrides to the 
South and of Ireland, was the inspiration to the English people 
to seize the American Continent for the Kingdom of God ac- 
cording to the Protestant Religion and for the Kingdom of 
England. And the victory which Raleigh and others won in 
Cadiz in 1696, completed the overthrow of the Spanish sea 
power, and justified Raleigh's title of "Shepherd of the Seas." 

It has been charged by those ignorant of the facts or in- 
capable of comprehending them, that Virginia was planted only 
for gain. The fact is far otherwise. 

The planting of Virginia had its origin in the religious zeal 
of the people of England; the prime objects of the movement 
were ever expressed to be the "welfare of the Kingdom of God 
and the Kingdom of England," and the final instructions to 
the first Colony that settled at Jamestown were closed with an 
exhortation "to serve and fear God, the Giver of all Goodness, 
for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not 
planted shall be rooted out." This exhortation the new settlers 
ever observed, and though the forms of worship differed on 
their part, and on the part of the Puritans, no Puritans were 
ever more zealous than those Church of England colonists of 

14 



Virginia. Religious fervor was the characteristic of the time. 
The annals and records show that religion was a prominent 
part of their life, and from that day to this the people of Vir- 
ginia have been among the most religious people in the world. 

On that first Sunday when the Indians attacked the Fort, 
as soon as the attack had been repulsed, "Worthy Master 
Hunt" asked the President if it were his pleasure to have a 
sermon, and Wingfield replied, that the "men were weary and 
hungry, and if it pleased him we would wait until some other 
time." And even this failure was made the subject of a charge 
against him by his enemies. 

The records are full of the piety of the time, and the 
ministrations of those faithful Soldiers of Christ, who came in 
the true missionary spirit, prepared to lay doAvn their lives 
even with joy in their Master's service. 

The first structure erected on this Island was a sail spread 
between the trees under which to conduct the service of God. 

Possibly, the first edifice erected after the construction of 
the fortifications, was however rude, built for a Church, and 
on its site four sacred edifices arose before Jamestown ceased 
to be the Capital of Virginia. And now the fifth has arisen 
through the pious zeal of those worthy women, successors of 
the pious women who first contributed to make that spot holy. 

The first act of Lord Baltimore on his arrival, when he had 
met and turned back the famishing remnant of the Colony, was 
to fall on his knees before he entered the South Gate of the 
Fort where Sir Thomas Gates was drawn up with his fifty sol- 
diers to receive him. 

The first laws posted in Virginia contained the laws pro- 
mulgated by Argall and his Council enjoining attendance on 
Divine Worship under penalty of "lying neck and heels on the 
corps du guarde for a day and night for the first offense, and 
slaverie to the Colony for a week ; for the second, and slaverie 
for a month, for the third, slaverie to the Colony for a year." 

15 



A law was soon passed enjoining upon every plantation 
to have a room set apart for the service of God, which should 
be used for no secular purpose. Indeed, whatever the short- 
comings of the Virginians were, the lack of piety was not among 
them. I venture to make the assertion that their attendance 
upon Divine Worship from the time of Argall's Laws, down 
to the last ringing of the Church bells has not been exceeded by 
the people of any other Colony or State in this Country. Tc 
gave the complexion to their life, and with chivalry and love 
of the rights of freemen gave its fibre. 

It is true, that the seeking of wealth bore its part in the 
enterprise, as it has ever borne its part as one of the objects of 
human endeavor. Sir Walter Raleigh sought El Dorado; but 
who will be so stupid as to charge that this was his chief aim? 
So, none can read the true story of the founding of Virginia 
without discovering on how much broader a foundation it was 
laid. The aspiration was for the establishment of a great 
Protestant State: a bulwark for England across seas. The 
foundation was cemented by the dust of thousands of bold 
Soldiers of Christ, who left comfort and ease behind them to 
face death here in its most terrible form. 

But there is not time even so much as to mention today the 
history of their self-sacrifice and lofty endeavor. All that may 
be done here is to point to their true story and give assurance 
that you will be well repaid for whatever trouble you may take 
to burrow out from the musty records of the time, their history ; 
for you will find it the story of as high and as noble fortitude as 
ever illumined the pages of human endeavor. No embellish- 
ment is required. Truly it may be said, as was said at the 
time, "That nothing can purge that famous action from the 
infamous scandal some ignorantly have conceded, as the plaine, 
simple and naked truth." 

We may not here even so much as touch on actions which 
were epoch-making in their results; for there is scarcely time 
to mention the names of Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Thomas Dale, 
Sir Samuel Argall, Sir George Yeardley, Sir Francis Wyatt, 

16 



William Claiborne and the long following of brave men who 
spent their lives for the First English Colony in America and 
her successors. 

At the Michaelmas Quarter Court of the Virginia Company, 
1619, Sir Edwin Sandys, a name ever memorable in the annals 
of America's founding, as that of the man possibly second only 
to Sir Walter Raleigh in his work for Virginia, recalled, "How 
by the admirable care and diligence of two worthy Knights, 
Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, the Colony was set 
forward in a way to great perfection ; whereof the former, Sir 
Thomas Gates, had the honour to all posterity to be the first 
named in His Majesty's Patent of grant to Virginia, and was 
the first who, by his wisdom, valour and industry, accompanied 
with exceeding pains and patience in the midst of so many 
difficulties, laid a foundation of that prosperous estate of the 
Colony, which afterward in the virtue of those beginnings did 
proceed. 

' ' The latter, Sir Thomas Dale, building upon those founda- 
tions with great and constant severity, had reclaimed almost 
miraculously those idle and disordered people, and reduced 
them to labour and an honest fashion of life; and proceeding 
with great zeal to the good of this Company." 

It is sufficient to say of Dale, that he abolished communism, 
under which the Colony had languished, and gave men their 
holdings in severalty; that he built the new town of Henrico 
in the loop of the James, which in 1612 had six rows of houses 
with the first stories of brick; had a hospital with four-score 
lodgings and beds sent over to furnish it ; and that he sent an 
expedition under Samuel Argall to clear the Virginia coast as 
far as Nova Scotia of intruders who had settled thereon. That 
he quelled faction; dominated the Indians, and made a peace 
with them which substantially lasted until 1622. 

It may be said of Argall, that "pleasant, ingenious and 
forward young gentleman," that he first crossed the Atlantic 
directly from England to the Chesapeake, and made the dis- 
covery that no counter winds or currents existed to prevent 

17 



such passage. That he carried out with supreme success Dale's 
plan of driving the French settlers from the coast of North 
Virginia, and made that coast secure for those Englishmen who 
came seven years later to found thereon the Plymouth and 
Massachusetts Bay Colonies; thereby insuring forever the 
Anglo-Saxon civilization on that shore. 

Incidentally it may be said, that Samuel Argall also first 
brought Negro slaves to Virginia, in his ship, "The Treasure," 
sometimes called "A Dutch Man-of-War," that being the tech- 
nical title for a Privateer. So his name is written large on the 
History of both Virginia and New England. 

Of Sir George Yeardley, ' ' The Mild Yeardley, ' ' it must be 
said that under him representative Government which was a 
growth of the Virginia Colony, first came into actual being. 

The Magna Charta of America was issued on November 
28, 1618: "The Great Charter of Privileges, Orders and Laws" 
providing for popular elective government in the Colony. It 
is recorded that that night "A Blazing Star" appeared in the 
sky. It was a blazing star, indeed, which appeared in the 
firmament that day. 

Here is the account of Yeardley 's proclamation: "And 
that they, (the People of Virginia,) here have a hand in the 
governing of themselves, it was granted that a General Assem- 
bly might be held yearly once ; whereat were to be present the 
Governor and Council, with two Burgesses from each Planta- 
tion, freely to be elected by the inhabitants thereof: This 
Assembly to have power to make and ordain whatsoever laws 
and orders should by them be thought good and profitable for 
our subsistence." 

In pursuance of this Proclamation the First House of Bur- 
gesses of Virginia — the first representative assembly that ever 
sat on the American Continent, assembled with the Governor 
and Council, and on this spot, on Friday, the 30th day of July, 
1619, held their first session. This was the beginning of popu- 
lar government in America. That day they consecrated this 
spot to Liberty. That day the fountain sprang which was the 

18 



source of the great current which today represents American 
constitutional ideas. 

Other fountains have sprung since then and have swelled 
this mighty current. From the little Mayflower and from her 
successors, and from that stern coast, once the coast of Northern 
Virginia, where they landed their brave companies, came vital 
streams to which I bear my willing tribute this day, as from 
other directions, South and West have poured in other streams, 
all tending to swell the mighty waters which make the vast 
main of American life, whose temperate waters temper every 
climate, and create on every shore the atmosphere in which 
Freedom springs. But this fountain, on this spot, was the 
source, and here, whoever comes, whether from New England ; 
from the far South; from the middle West; or from that vast 
region on the shores of the farthest sea; come not as visitors, 
but as those to whom this hallowed spot belongs of right. 

Outside of the small class of students of the history of 
that time little is known of the work accomplished by this 
Colony of Virginia and the people who founded it. Historians 
themselves have taken little account of the influence that this 
plantation and the work of its founders exerted in molding 
anew the thought of the English People in the direction of 
Liberty. Yet it was the necessity for a new form of govern- 
ment adapted to the needs of a wholly new system of colonial 
existence which brought the changes in the charters granted 
by the Crown to the people who undertook this settlement. It 
was the protests of Gabriel Archer, of Edward Maria Wing- 
field, of John Martin, George Percy, Christopher Newport, and 
others that influenced Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of South- 
ampton, the Ferrars and their fellow-adventurers and co- 
workers to stand for greater freedom in the government, until 
the Spirit of Freedom had so permeated the English House of 
Commons that new charters were granted and self-government 
arose to take the place of royal prerogative. The Virginia 
courts became the talk of the English people, and every session 
was thronged with interested onlookers studying the new sys- 

19 



tern of government until they came to be known as the "Vir- 
ginia Parliaments." The Spanish Ambassador warned King 
James I. that his Virginia Courts "were but a Seminary for a 
Seditious Parliament;" and James who was desirous to secure 
an alliance by marriage with Spain, set to work to suppress the 
liberties granted under the Virginia Charter. 

In 1618, as already stated, the Patriot Party secured the 
right for the settlers of Virginia to elect a Representative 
Assembly, and this Assembly, composed of two members from 
each of the eleven Boroughs in Virginia, sat in the choir of that 
Church, and thus that sacred spot is doubly holy ground: con- 
secrated to Religion and to Liberty. 

From the first, the representatives began to assert their 
rights. They claimed the privilege of the Commons of Eng- 
land, of sitting with their hats on. They appointed a committee 
to take under consideration the Charter: and ascertain if it 
contained anything not perfectly squaring with the state of the 
Colony. "Because," said they, "this Charter is to bind us 
and our posterity forever." They further presented a petition 
to the Virginia Company in London urging that as under their 
Charter no laws could become final without the approval of the 
Company in London, so no orders issued by the Company in 
London should become effective unless approved by them as 
the Representatives of the people in Virginia. 

The right thus claimed was accorded them by the Vir- 
ginia Company in London the following year. And this was 
the first victory of the American people over the Crown. 

Meantime, the contest went on between the Crown and 
the Court Party on one side, and the Patriot Party on the 
other. The latter represented by Sir Edwin Sandys, the Earl 
of Southampton, the Ferrars and other patriots, who by this 
time were identifying the rights of the people of Virginia with 
the rights of the people of England as against the claims of 
high prerogative asserted by King James and the Spanish 
Party. 



20 



The people were now alive to their rights. James awoke 
to the danger of so much liberty in his "fifth" kingdom, but it 
was too late. The Virginians had tasted the sweets of popular 
government and stood on their rights. 

Everything appeared prosperous in Virginia, when without 
warning, on the morning of April 1st, 1622, the Indians fell on 
the unsuspecting Colonists and massacred over four hundred 
of them. Jamestown, the seat of Government, was saved 
through a warning given the night before by an Indian named 
Chanco ; but from the Falls of the James to the Chesapeake the 
plantations were devastated. The flourishing town of Henrico 
was destroyed, and with it went the Hospital and the endowed 
College. Thus, the light which had been lighted with so much 
zeal was quenched in blood. Six members of the Council fell 
victims, including Mr. Thorpe, the Deputy for the College. 

Had Virginia not already been established on a firm foun- 
dation, this blow must have destroyed her. As it was, it only 
served to excite both the Company and the Colony to renewed 
efforts. But the University, started with such high hopes, was 
dead. The settlers from this time applied themselves to the 
work of clearing all that region of a people who had proved so 
"subtile," and the leader of the movement upon same was the 
"Mild Yeardley." From now on, we find the settlers going on 
"Marches" three times every year to harry and do them all 
the damage in their power. 

Happily for Virginia, and happily for the world by the 
time that King James felt himself strong enough to attempt to 
suppress our liberties they had become too firmly established 
for his plan to be carried out. Sir Walter Raleigh fell a 
victim; but the great Country which he had done so much to 
found, and of which he had been the first and "Chief Gov- 
ernor," survived, and survived also the spirit which he had 
done so much to create. 

Any man but Sir Edwin Sandys, "rather the Devil than 
Sir Edwin Sandys," said the King, speaking of the election of 
the Virginia Treasurer and Chief Manager. But Sir Edwin 



Sandys was elected Treasurer for all that. And though later 
King James nominated a number of men for Treasurer at an- 
other election, the Earl of Southampton, of Sir Edwin Sandys' 
Party and friends, was chosen by the Company. And when 
these men with others were arrested by King James by reason 
of their outspokenness in the cause of Liberty, the English 
House of Commons entered a protest on its records against 
this exercise of tyrannous power, and sent a Committee down 
to Kent to inquire after Sir Edwin Sandys. King James, it is 
true, was enabled for a time to assert his power. He went to 
Westminster, got possession of the minutes of the House of 
Commons and in the presence of his Privy Council, with his 
own hands tore from the records the pages on which they had 
spread their protest. He seized the records of the Virginia 
Company and revoked their Charters, appointing Royal Com- 
missioners to make inquisition in Virginia. But King James's 
son was tried at the Bar of the English Parliament : that same 
body whose protest his father tore from their record book, and 
by law, died on the scaffold. And in that Parliament sat many 
of the men who had helped to make Virginia. 

Virginia was Rolayist, but she was Royalist as Raleigh 
and Southampton and Sandys were Royalist. And no Repub- 
lican or Roundhead was ever more jealous for his rights than 
were her Royalist people. When King James sent his Com- 
missioners here to make their inquisition, and they demanded 
the Virginia records, the Virginia Assembly refused to give 
them up, and when their Clerk, Edward Sharpless, gave to the 
Commissioners a copy of the records, the Assembly stood him 
in the Pillory and cut off his ear. 

It is a commentary on the way in which history is written 
that this punishment of Edward Sharpless is found in the most 
recent history of the settlement of this country, and doubtless 
one of the most complete, set down as an illustration of the 
form of punishment at that time in vogue in Virginia ; but no 
mention is made of the significant fact that the punishment was 
inflicted for the crime of obeying the order of the Crown rather 
than the order of the General Assembly of Virginia. 

22 



James I. attempted to suppress their Charters by seizing 
them, but the records show that laws continued to be passed 
by the Governor and Council and the people of Virginia in 
Assembly. And in 1628 they extorted their Charters again 
from the reluctant hand of Charles I. 

The origin of the Kepublican idea in Virginia has been 
dated by those ignorant of Virginia's history from the Stamp 
Act in 1765; by others not quite so ignorant, from Bacon's Re- 
bellion in 1676 ; while yet others have dated it from the Session 
of the First Assembly in 1619. But the seed had been sown, 
and the plan had been growing, though with many a let and 
hindrance since the first experience of the Colonists and of the 
managers of the enterprise in England under "the King's 
faction-producing form of Government." 

The popular Charters of 1609 and 1612, which sprang from 
the sentiment for a freer Government, themselves opened the 
way for the development of liberal ideas of government in the 
New Country. From the time that the Representatives of the 
people first sat on Virginia soil, there was never, as we look 
back on it now; any real danger that the people would not 
achieve their liberties. The object of Sir Edwin Sandys, when 
drafting the popular Charters, was to found a free popular 
State here. It was this idea, and the known realization of it, 
which brought the Mayflower and her ship's company of 
Liberty-seekers to the shores of Northern Virginia in 1620, as 
it had brought so many ship-loads to Virginia. 

In 1624 the Virginia Assembly passed a law providing that 
no taxes should be levied in Virginia but by and with the con- 
sent of the Virginia Assembly. And this was the very ground 
on which one hundred and fifty years later the American Revo- 
lution was based. From this time, during this one hundred 
and fifty years, the continual assertion of this right was the 
product of the Virginia Colony and its civilization ; for whether 
it was asserted in Virginia or in New England, it was based on 
the principle thus first enunciated and asserted by the Virginia 
Colony. 

23 



From this time the people were aroused, and not many 
years later when one of their Governors, Sir John Harvey, 
failed to espouse as warmly as they thought proper the cause 
of William Claiborne, "The Rebel," in his war with the Lord 
Proprietor of the new colony of Maryland, they "Thrust him 
out of the Government." This was the first revolution that 
actually took place on American soil. 

They withstood Cromwell to the point of exacting what 
was a treaty with his Commissioners ; but they readily assimi- 
lated the defeated Royalists who came over after Edge Hill and 
Naseby and Worcester, and the exiled Republicans who sought 
homes among the planters after the Restoration. The deposed 
Governor appealed to Charles I. who reinstated him as Gov- 
ernor, but the Virginians, though they received him loyally, as 
they later did his successor, Sir William Berkeley, were now 
well aware of the strength of their position. They were loyal 
subjects of the Stuarts, as they were a hundred years later 
loyal subjects of George III. ; but they were more loyal yet 
to their idea of popular Government. Their petitions were 
filled with expressions of loyalty. They viewed the death of 
Charles I. with horror, and offered a realm to his son when in 
exile. But with it all went enthusiastic devotion to the cause 
of self-government, and whenever it was assailed they flamed 
into revolution. 

"The Rebellion" led by Nathaniel Bacon in 1676, was at 
bottom for the same cause with that which a hundred years 
later was led by George Washington. The immediate occasion 
was different, but the basic cause was the same in both. The 
inalienable right of British subjects to have self-government. 
Both of them were based on the original Charters under which 
Virginia was planted. 

As the years progressed and the settlements extended 
further to the Westward, other elements came in. Stout 
Scotch-Irish settlers poured into the Western Districts from 
North Ireland, particularly after the various revolutions. A 
strong infusion of Huguenot blood followed, and gave the Old 
Dominion some of her most noted sons. 

24 



Thus, the population of the Old Dominion was composed 
of sundry strains, all virile ; and as the race pushed Westward 
they carried with them the distinctive civilization which still 
shows today along the lines they traveled, leaving its impress 
in Kentucky, Tennessee, Southern Ohio, Missouri and sections 
of many other States, and materially affecting all of them. 
For the civilization of the Old Dominion, while naturally more 
clearly preserved within her own borders, is not limited to her 
own long-shrunken confines. As the oldest, wealthiest and 
strongest Colony, she, during the Colonial period, most strongly 
influenced the life of all the Colonies; leading them finally in 
their action of breaking the ties which bound them to the 
Old Country. 

She inspired the ideas, encouraged her sister Colonies; 
supplied the statesmen who led the movement and the Chief 
who led the Revolutionary Armies to final Victory. 

It was by no mere accident that George Washington, 
Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson ; the Lees ; the Harrisons ; 
the Nelsons; the Randolphs; the Blands and other leaders of 
the Revolutionary movement came from the shores of the 
rivers which pour into the Chesapeake. They were the product 
of the life established on those shores. 

Then when Independence was achieved, she led the move- 
ment to establish a more permanent Union by the adoption of 
the Constitution of the United States, to effect which she 
surrendered her vast Northwest Territory which her sons had 
conquered. And having effected this, it was under one of 
her sons that the great Louisiana Territory was secured, and 
under another that the loose bonds of the Constitution were 
welded to make the whole homogeneous and effective. 

The place where this Colony planted itself was so strategic 
that it became the battle ground in almost every war which 
followed in which America bore a part. Hampton Roads and 
the Chesapeake into which it pours, where now lie represen- 
tatives of the navies of the world have been the scene of many 
of the important engagements of modern warfare. 

25 



The head of this Island, seized and fortified by these 
settlers whose deeds and endurance we are commemorating 
bears the indelible traces of a later and greater war whose 
fierceness and bloodshed many of us here remember. 

Not long since it was my fortune to walk over this ground 
and view these imperishable relics of this dreadful strife; 
where the redouts of the Civil War rose upon the very ground 
where the first settlers planted their first fortress. Within 
fifty paces rose the only surviving remnant of the town which 
gave its name to this Island. The ivy-clad ruin of a Church 
Tower had survived all else save the foundation and the mem- 
ories of this fateful settlement. Beyond it rose the rebuilt 
body of a Church — rebuilt through the pious and patriotic 
devotion of American women who bearing the patriotic name 
of the Colonial Dames of America representing more than even 
that distinguished class whose name they bear, for they repre- 
sent whatever is best in American womanhood. And bearing 
the chief part of this work are those who come from the region 
once known as North Virginia. I cannot but think it the work 
of God that these pious women should place here as their 
memorial of the great deed here wrought the restored edifice 
of the First Christian Temple. And that God will bless the 
work. 

That night I stood on the deck of a boat anchored on the 
bosom of the river and gazed on this Island as it lay under 
the moonlight and half veiled by the soft and mysterious haze. 
It was about midnight, and all nature appeared as though 
asleep : the veiled sky and long line of the shore with its clump 
of trees marking this spot, the placid river, the deep unbroken 
silence of the night transforming it into a scene of peace. 
The redouts had disappeared ; even the sacred edifice itself was 
veiled from sight; only God's sky looked down upon God's 
earth. And it seemed to me as though wars and strife were 
but a dream, as though the differences and contentions and 
strifes were all petty and transient, and the only thing that 
was abiding and eternal was Nature and God, who has promised 
Peace to them who love Him. 

26 



Jamestown took on for me that night a new significance. 
It became the emblem of that earnest, devoted and patriotic 
zeal which inspires the heart of every true Freeman. In that 
mysterious haze all parochial lines and insular confines dis- 
appeared, and it became the real Cradle of the American 
People wherever they may be, and of that for which they stand 
fundamentally, however they may express it. By her shores 
glided the James bearing its flood of tempered waters to the 
great ocean whose currents help to create or temper the climates 
of the World. 

The Avon to the Severn runs, 

And the Severn to the Sea, 

And Wyckliffe's dust is spread abroad 

Wide as the waters be. 

Thus, the James cutting away through the long generations 
the edge of this Island in which lay interred the mortal remains 
of most of those who first came to seize this land for England 
and her civilization has borne that dust to all shores, and thus 
the work they performed has been borne on the tide of time 
to leaven and advance all the institutions of mankind. 

This is no occasion for sectional or personal-selfgratulation. 
On this spot, at this time, such congratulation as we may 
venture to feel, if properly informed, must be National and 
Racial. The work, the deeds, the acts performed here belong 
not to us alone; but to every part of this country, and, in a 
larger sense, to every part of the world where men strive 
and aspire. From this spot went forth the streams which 
have made the great main of American life, and in a way, of 
all life which has been affected by the American life. Had 
this Colony not had being, it is possible that no other English 
Colony might have taken root on these shores. Had this 
Colony not had being it is almost certain that the life planted 
here would not have taken the form which it did take. Had 
this Colony not had being, it is possible that this republic 
might never have been, and that all the blessings that have 
flowed therefrom, including the blessing of human liberty, 
might never have been. 

27 



To this sacred spot then we have come this day to render 
duly our reverent expression of praise and thanksgiving. 

It has been well said that God acts through His prepared 
agencies, and that He prepared Virginia to place the seal of 
His favor on and the Virginia colonists and their successors as 
His instruments to accomplish His mighty work. 

On this sacred spot, chastened by the solemn associations 
which this holy ground evokes, we cannot but echo this thought ; 
and when I speak of Virginia, it is not so much the present 
Virginia that I bear in mind as that "Old Virginia," whose 
eastern shores extended from her Floridian confines on the 
south to the forty-fifth degree of north latitude on the north, 
and whose border to the westward reached to "the furthest 
sea." 

From her northeastern territory of "North Virginia," 
charted by and cleared of invaders by her Governors, came 
New England; and from her southern, her western and her 
northwestern territory, explored and conquered by her sons, 
have come all the States from the Carolinas to the "Furthest 
Sea." 

In fact, this occasion belongs to all America. This spot 
belongs to the continent. The heart of it is Old Virginia; the 
core of the heart is this spot. But the body to which this 
heart and this heart's core belong is this Land — this People, 
whose representatives from all over the Union are assembled 
here today. Virginian as I am in every fibre of my being, I 
declare my belief before the High God that this spot belongs 
by indefeasible title to all the people of this country, and that 
there is no power under heaven to defeat their claim. To 
Massachusetts and Maine and New York and Michigan as to 
Kentucky and West Virginia, I say, it is yours — here our 
forefathers first planted the tree whose fruit was to be for the 
salvation of the nations. We hold it, but as a sacred trust 
for all. For here was the cradle not only of the Common- 
wealth of Virginia, but of the Republic. 



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